


Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter;

by perfectlight



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M, waxing poetic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-17
Updated: 2013-08-17
Packaged: 2017-12-23 18:38:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/929762
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perfectlight/pseuds/perfectlight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>First, and last, but they touch each other, see. Loop back, scatter colours, and kiss. A five-piece melody.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter;

**First**.

 

First there is the labyrinth, and they’re twisting through it, collecting stars. Sometimes she’s there but really she isn’t and then it’s bright, and white, and whispering. Stories, she’ll know later, but later isn’t now. Now is _run_ and _fight_ but really it isn’t; really they’d lost before they’d even begun, lost everything, lost her. 

 

She came back, of course, mirror to mirror, face to face. Flecks of an almost-childhood on pale, pale skin. She remembered. She was brave. 

 

Brave hurt, when he screamed; hurt worse, when she showed him shadows shaped by his own hand. (Soft hands, long hands; he’d held her, broken her, found her with those hands. Touched her until she was his, and mostly he was hers, but she didn’t know her ending, see. Only the beginning, and how it stopped.) Brave fixed her again when he laughed, when he ran. No more warrior, only wanderer. 

 

Then she fixed her parents, and then she went home. Brave was tiring. And there were nightmares, too. 

 

 

**Second**.

 

Second is the white, but it’s the wrong white, and it’s choking. White captures shadows and hides them till she’s blind; never knows when they’re coming, only her dreams know. She fights in the dreams, stains white with gold and searches for red. Red for real, and for brave. Swinging like the mobile of the chopped-up lonely stars.

 

Red for life, squeezing and slipping through double-drumming lumps. Her heart is wrong, she knows, cut up and scattered and sluiced between sharp ribs, jutting ribs. White bone on white skin. She’s brave, in the dark, searching for red in bins and on bodies, but it’s always wrong, and then gold, and newness. Lost, but lost is rough-edged, jagged, hurts too much for anything but remembering. 

 

Walking, then. Out of white and into black and across the sea for blood, her blood. 

 

When she finds it and keeps it the forgetting comes easily, smoother than water, smoother than clocks. She slides into it selfishly, but the colors stay. Flecks on skin, like lostness, and newness.

 

 

**Third**.

 

Third is three people who live too long and die too young, and make family before they are friends. But she dreams about circles and knows how they lock – irrevocable – together. Red hair, red eyes, red school jumpers. Blood looping to blood without even remembering. Friends make a family, see; beginnings are less important. Endings hurt. 

 

They tell stories. Sprawled in sunlight, half-buried in garden. Submerged in pretending and forgetting it ends. There are heroes in the grasses, ragged wonders in the dirt. Fairies on treetops that she believes in, somehow.

 

“Promise he’s real?” Rory’s voice; too shrill, too scared. He hasn't learn how to hide scared yet. (Swathe it in lies and smiles and light. Tuck it away and forget it, like the mobile, like the doll. Like her.) He would learn.

 

Because her name is still a fairy tale, Amelia gives a sharp nod with a sharp chin and looses a sharp word into the air; a falling dagger of an oath, burning like a star. “Promise.”

 

She knows he’s real. She knows the whisper and the wood of his box more surely than she knows her own body, knew any of her bodies. She knows myth from belief and truth from love, and knows the old behind the raggedy tucked-in edges of young. Sometimes she’s old herself, but forgets it. 

 

But their insides fit their outsides and they haven’t yet breathed broken time, so she doesn’t tell them yet. Doesn’t always know what there is to tell them, really. Instead she closes her eyes, thinks of ocean, and dark. White flecks past the shadow. Eyes open, says, “Wanna play hide-and-seek?”

 

 

**Fourth**.

 

Fourth is burning, and forgetting, and breaking her way into newness brighter than any gold she’s ever seen. When it’s done, she’s tired, and she hurts, so she knows it was right. 

 

He carries her. Holds her body, skin on skin, ancient veneer on freshest face. Whispers to her mind in the loops of dreams she’s forgotten she forgot about. Double-drum and double-drum, and everything fits into place. 

 

 

**Fifth**.

 

Fifth is alone. They leave her. Only so much later, when the loops close, beginning to end, does she know it never stops. 

 

Stories end. She’d forgotten that.

 

She ends in white. Blazing. Not right, but as close as she’ll come.

 

There’s more forgetting, after a while. She tells stories. The children listen. 

 

She forgets why she tells them. She tells them anyway. Bravery is always last learnt and last lost.

 

When she goes, it is quiet. Painless. A fade into darkness that isn’t dark. Nor lonely, but there’s not a way to tell him that, see. So she carries it like a lost heartbeat, or a memory. A golden secret in newness of after.

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from John Keats. I will write River a happy ending one day, I _will_.


End file.
